Maps and Legends|报价￥148.00|图书,进口原版,Non Fiction 人文社科,Education 教育,Michael Chabon

点此购买报价￥148.00

目录：图书,进口原版,Non Fiction 人文社科,Education 教育,

品牌：Michael Chabon

基本信息·出版社：McSweeney's

·页码：200 页

·出版日期：2008年

·ISBN：1932416897

·条形码：9781932416893

·装帧：平装

·英语：英语

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内容简介Michael Chabon's sparkling first book of nonfiction is a love song in 16 parts — a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection. His own fiction, meanwhile, is explored from the perspective of personal history: post-collegiate desperation sparks his debut,The Mysteries of Pittsburgh;procrastination and doubt reveal the way towardWonder Boys;a love of comics and a basement golem combine to create the Pulitzer Prize-winningThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay;and an enigmatic Yiddish phrasebook unfurls intoThe Yiddish Policeman's Union.

媒体推荐Michael Chabon is fascinated with life "along the borderlands," those perilous regions between and beyond what we claim to know. In these intriguing essays, he strolls through this netherworld, taking up topics from golems to suburbia.

Sometimes, the topic is literary form, like the ghost story and the epic fantasy. For instance, in "Trickster in a Suit of Lights," an allusion to Lewis Hyde's "Trickster Makes This World," Chabon says the short story has fallen out of favor with readers but can be revived. "Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go," he writes.

Elsewhere, Chabon examines comic books, writing for example in "The Killer Hook" of Howard Chaykin's "American Flagg!" that it "stands at the glorious midpoint, at that difficult fulcrum between innocence and experience, romance and disillusion, adventure and satire, the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic, between the stoned, rangy funkiness of the Seventies and the digitized cool of the present day, between a time when outrage was a moral position and a time when it has become a way of life. Such balancing acts have always been the greatest feats of American popular art."

Many essays draw on Chabon's personal history, from the books he read as a boy, to his early years as a novelist, to his search as a contemporary Jew for a literal as well as figurative homeland, to his preoccupation with the idea that writers are imperiled by their own creations. In "Ragnarok Boy," for instance, he writes about his childhood love of a book of Norse myths that illuminated for him the tumultuous 1960s, especially through Loki, "the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them."

Chabon writes, "We all grew up - all of us, from the beginning - in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world both ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, it seemed a little more true than usual."

Chabon is an accomplished fiction writer, having won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." This essay collection is his first. While interesting, many of the 16 pieces can be tedious, largely because of tortured phrasing. Many are also somewhat shallow, skimming whimsically along without probing the ideas they raise. And those ideas are often idiosyncratic. Still, when Chabon shines in "Maps and Legends" he shines brightly, displaying an inquisitive mind at work.

Robert Braile reviews regularly for the Globe. --The Boston Globe, August 2008

Michael Chabon is more substantive in MAPS AND LEGENDS: READING AND WRITING ALONG THE BORDERLANDS. Readers just catching up to Chabon's novels--gay Gatsby, groves of academe, superhero graphic, boy's book of pilgrimage, neo-Victorian espionage, sci-fi noir--already know that he is fiercely loyal to the child he was and will enjoy his wind-chiming on genre fiction from Poe to Nabokov; "tricksters" from Loki, Coyote, and Krishna to Borges, Calvino, and Pynchon; horror stories by M. R. James, Sherlock Holmes under Conan Doyle's hood; Norse myths, Philip Pullman, John Milton and epic fantasy; Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Captain Marvel; Howard Chaykin and Citizen Kane; Ben Katchor and Julius Knipl; Cormac McCarthy, Will Eisner, and other golems. What is so startling is how much more interesting most of these indulgences are to read about in Chabon's pages than they were on their own, in the pulpy original, as if the nostalgic novelist, like the magician-for-hire in his Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, can make paper roses consumed by fire bloom from a pile of ash. --Harper's, April 2008

Michael Chabon's first collection of nonfiction, makes an inviting case for bridging the gap between popular and literary writing, as he considers the high and the low, from comics to Cormac McCarthy. Like the makers of golems, creatures of Jewish legend, "the writer shapes his story, flecked like river clay wit the grit of experience and rank with the smell of human life." Vital energy and a boundless appetite for risk give these essays their electric charge. --O, The Oprah Magazine, April 2008

编辑推荐From Publishers Weekly

You would hardly think, reading Chabon's new book of essays, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about comics. Rather, he is bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books. Serious writers, he says, cannot venture into these genres without losing credibility. No self-respecting literary genius... would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an 'entertainer,' Chabon writes. An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing 'She's a Lady' to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underwear up onto the stage. Chabon devotes most of the essays to examining specific genres that he admires, from M.R. James's ghost stories to Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic work,The Road.The remaining handful of essays are more memoir-focused, with Chabon explaining how he came to write many of his books. Chabon casts himself as one of the few brave souls willing to face ridicule—from whom isn't entirely clear, though it seems to be academics—to write as he wishes. I write from the place I live: in exile, he says. It's hard to imagine the audience for this book. Chabon seems to want to debate English professors, but surely only his fellow comic-book lovers will be interested in his tirade.(Apr.)

Review

Michael Chabon is fascinated with life "along the borderlands," those perilous regions between and beyond what we claim to know. In these intriguing essays, he strolls through this netherworld, taking up topics from golems to suburbia.Sometimes, the topic is literary form, like the ghost story and the epic fantasy. For instance, in "Trickster in a Suit of Lights," an allusion to Lewis Hyde's "Trickster Makes This World," Chabon says the short story has fallen out of favor with readers but can be revived. "Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way that the novel has done so often in its long history, the short story must, inevitably, go," he writes.Elsewhere, Chabon examines comic books, writing for example in "The Killer Hook" of Howard Chaykin's "American Flagg!" that it "stands at the glorious midpoint, at that difficult fulcrum between innocence and experience, romance and disillusion, adventure and satire, the unashamedly commercial and the purely aesthetic, between the stoned, rangy funkiness of the Seventies and the digitized cool of the present day, between a time when outrage was a moral position and a time when it has become a way of life. Such balancing acts have always been the greatest feats of American popular art."Many essays draw on Chabon's personal history, from the books he read as a boy, to his early years as a novelist, to his search as a contemporary Jew for a literal as well as figurative homeland, to his preoccupation with the idea that writers are imperiled by their own creations. In "Ragnarok Boy," for instance, he writes about his childhood love of a book of Norse myths that illuminated for him the tumultuous 1960s, especially through Loki, "the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them."Chabon writes, "We all grew up - all of us, from the beginning - in a time of violence and invention, absurdity and Armageddon, prey and witness to the worst and the best in humanity, in a world both ruined and made interesting by Loki. I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction, even if, in Maryland in 1969, as today, it seemed a little more true than usual."Chabon is an accomplished fiction writer, having won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." This essay collection is his first. While interesting, many of the 16 pieces can be tedious, largely because of tortured phrasing. Many are also somewhat shallow, skimming whimsically along without probing the ideas they raise. And those ideas are often idiosyncratic. Still, when Chabon shines in "Maps and Legends" he shines brightly, displaying an inquisitive mind at work.Robert Braile reviews regularly for the Globe. --The Boston Globe, August 2008

点此购买报价￥148.00